3 Answers
3

They are nearly the same. The only thing that matters whether all the hardware is recognized by ubuntu. If you can try the laptops with a live cd, bring one, and test.
Personally I think AMD did a great job with the Liano platform, it preforms better when it comes to graphics, 3D rendering, HD movies and it even has nice Turbo speeds.
Also it has 4 physical cores, and Intel i3 has only 2 physical + 2 virtual (HT). So I would choose the AMD.

visit friendly.ubuntu.com to look for your candidate laptops and see community testing results. Or visit ubuntu.com/certification to see if any of them have Ubuntu Certified status. This gives you a good indication of how compatible the rest of the components are. Other than this I concur with gajdipajti.
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roadmrJan 11 '12 at 1:31

While I realize that I am late for the party, I am putting my 2 cents for future readers. If I was in your shoes, I would opt for the Intel Core i3 processor. Sandy Bridge has been a magnificent line of processors, all of which where great all around performers.

As for the performance of the two, it may look like the i3 is crippled with only 2 physical cores and 2 logical via Hyperthreading, however you have to note that the i3 2100 was (in many) benchmarks surpassing the amd fx 4100 performance, which is a chip from the bulldozer architecture, known to be superior to Llano architecture, unless you take into account the integrated graphics of the Llano architecture.